I am a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute. A former Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan, I also am a Senior Fellow in International Religious Persecution with the Institute on Religion and Public Policy. I am the author and editor of numerous books, including Foreign Follies: America's New Global Empire, The Politics of Plunder: Misgovernment in Washington, and Beyond Good Intentions: A Biblical View of Politics. I am a graduate of Florida State University and Stanford Law School.

It's Time To Declare Peace In The War Against Drugs

Americans like to style their nation as the land of the free. Yet the government is engaged in a war on its own people. The misnamed Drug War.

As Prof. Douglas Husak of Rutgers pointed out:

The war, after all, cannot really be a war on drugs, since drugs cannot be arrested, prosecuted, or punished. The war is against persons who use drugs. As such, the war is a civil war, fought against the 28 million Americans who use illegal drugs annually.

Arresting and jailing people because they use a substance which some people abuse is dubious enough on moral grounds. Even more it fails the test of cost-effectiveness.

We need not resolve the ethical issue to agree on policy. Prohibition is an attempted cure that makes matters worse for both the addict and the rest of us.”

Banning drugs raises their price, creates enormous profits for criminal entrepreneurs, thrusts even casual users into an illegal marketplace, encourages heavy users to commit property crimes to acquire higher-priced drugs, leaves violence the only means for dealers to resolve disputes, forces government to spend lavishly on enforcement, corrupts public officials and institutions, and undermines a free society. All of these effects are evident today and are reminiscent of Prohibition (of alcohol) in the early 20th Century.

Perhaps the most obvious cost of enforcing the drug laws is financial. Government must create an expansive and expensive enforcement apparatus, including financial and military aid to other governments. At the same time, the U.S. authorities must forgo any tax revenue from a licit drug market. According to Harvard’s Jeffrey A. Miron and doctoral candidate Katherine Waldock, in the U.S. alone “legalizing drugs would save roughly $41.3 billion per year in government expenditure on enforcement of prohibition” and “yield tax revenue of $46.7 billion annually.”

The Drug War also has corrupted private and public institutions wherever it has reached. Worst are bribes to police, border control officials, Drug Enforcement Agency agents, and even military personnel involved in interdiction efforts. The taint also reaches prosecutors, judges, and politicians.

The problem is serious enough in the U.S. Worse, militarized enforcement, relentlessly pushed by Washington, has helped corrupt and destabilize entire nations, such as Colombia, Afghanistan, and Mexico.

Prohibition is advanced to protect users from themselves. However, the illegal marketplace makes drug use more dangerous. According to noted economists Daniel K. Benjamin and Roger Leroy Miller, “Many of the most visible adverse effects attributed to drug use … are due not to drug use per se, but to our current public policy toward drugs.”

Products are adulterated; users have no means of guaranteeing quality. Given the threat of discovery, dealers prefer to transport and market more potent (and thus both more concealable and valuable) drugs. As a result, the vast majority of “drug-related” deaths are “drug law-related” deaths.

Moreover, AIDS spread through the sharing of needles by IV drug users, who cannot purchase needles legally. In the same way, the drug war has helped spread hepatitis and other blood-borne diseases.

The Drug War also interferes with treatment of the sick and dying. Cannabis and other drugs can aid people suffering from a variety of maladies. Additional research would help determine how, in what form, and for what marijuana could be best used. Yet government effectively punishes vulnerable people in great pain, even agony.

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You might have a good point if it wasn’t built on a PFTA assumption that crack heads would necessarily have “free access.”

It’s a pretty common thing for people to declare that their baseless predictions of how a regulated market would look will in fact be the way things are, and then to argue based on that false premise.

Our choices are not binary. It isn’t a matter of either summary execution of anyone who is even suspected of involvement with substances on the naught list or being forced to allow the sales reps from the heroin factory to set up promotional displays in elementary school lobbies in order to give out free samples to the kiddies in 1st grade. There is a wide continuum in between.

It is absurd to argue that we will be required to give up policies that have been proven successful if we abandon policies that have been proven to be utter failure, counterproductive, unjust, and just plain stupid.

No country,government,kingdom,Republic,society has ever made prohibition work,,I keep seeing America slapping it’s forehead for the next century,trying to clean this mess up.

It has been an expensive trip to get to this point,and the most beneficial thing about ending this,”America’s Berlin Wall”,besides the freedom of choice being returned to America,is that quitting this enterprise releases so much federal tax dollars from locking up non-violent criminals that perhaps we can hire enough teachers to educate our children,our future with enough education to save us ever making this kind of mistake again.

Politicians made hemp illegal,politicians were and are bought and paid for like commodities on the market,highest bidder gets the pork.

Please Ameica,wake up you are being played.

Read history,read why “marijuana” was prohibited in 1937,,it is the same reason it has been kept illegal now,plus the paramilitary bureaucratic empire and all it’s supporting spin-off federal bureaucracies and private industries.

ROBERT L. DU PONT, M.D., For more than 30 years, Robert L. DuPont, M.D. has been a leader in drug abuse prevention and treatment. Among his many contributions he was the first Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (1973-1978) and was the second White House Drug Chief (1973-1978). Following this gaovernment career, in 1978 Dr. DuPont became the founding president of the Institute for Behavior and Health, Inc. (www.ibhinc.org), and in 1982, with his longtime colleague, Peter Bensinger, he founded Bensinger DuPont & Associates.

Drug Testing Management

Bensinger, DuPont & Associates’ (BDA) provides a full-service solution to drug testing management. Our services are designed to help employers establish and manage workplace drug and alcohol testing programs that are technically and forensically sound, protecting the rights of applicants, employees and employers.

The first drug czar loses if prohibition ends. And every drug czar since the first is now involved in spin-off industries created for and by the war on some drugs.

Former DEA administrators are lobbyist for corporations trying to sell new technology for the drugar and running/advising treatment centers for the thousands of marijuana users furnished by judicial forced rehab.

The “move to rehab instead of prison proudly claimed by the present drug czar.

I have often wondered based on a purely financial basis why any nation would engage in this idiocy.

Add up the financial costs to the nation in enforcement, courts, imprisonment, fines, lawlessness, mayhem, health, violence, property damage; and add up the financial benefits, seeing which side wins out.

Its all cost and no benefit. Quite a fine little business the DEA has carved out for itself. And the arms of the DEA do not cease to operate beyond US borders. Mexico presently enjoys the same costs of the drug on a scale far exceeding that in the US.

All of the cocaine consumed in the US would fit into several transport trailers or perhaps 2 shipping containers. How on earth is any organization, armed with the most advanced devices in detection, ever going to find that tiny amount among the hundreds of thousands of containers that enter the US annually!

They can’t. Why fight a war when the result will always be perpetual defeat? It’s madness.

I thought that in our legal system, punishments were to fit the crime and were to be deterants to prevent one from engaging in criminal activity which could harm other members of society. I see very little harm to society by someone doing drugs. In fact, the drug-user is usually only harming him/herself. So the war on drugs essentially punishes someone for harming him/herself. Then, the drug-user ends up with a criminal record and as a result is barred from a number of occupations, and potentially loses his/her job. How can the user now make a living? Crime. So, the war on drugs essentially turns people who harm only themselves into criminals who now are likely to harm other members of society. Drivers who speed, talk on their cell phones, etc. pose a much greater risk to society than drug-users. Why aren’t they thrown in jail?

As a person who suffered from chronic pain for over a decade and was refused by ALL doctors as I had no insurance and could not front the thousands of dollars they required to even start tests, I became a victim of this war. After years of worsening pain I finally became bedridden and suicidal. I then learned I could order prescription pain meds online. I did and got my life back for the first time in many years. I started back to college which I had stopped due to the pain, was able to run my home business and function as a wife, mother and grandmother again. Until last November 2010 when a twenty man SWAT team broke my door down and took me away to jail in handcuffs. All for less than one months worth of pain meds. I was herded through the system, forced to take a plea bargain and am now a convicted felon for life. A mother, grandmother, wife of 34 years, voter, community activist, student and business owner… no one cared less about my medical condition. there is not a word harsh enough that expresses the unconscionable of doing this to a citizen.

Here in Washington State, the state now grows pot. It also takes pot from other dealers & sells it, when ever it can. If you pay the state through the nose, you can grow it for them to sell, or you can sign up to pay them taxes on what you grow for yourself. Of course, Washingtonians are ignorant of all of this, just like the rest of Americans. So, the state being the drug dealer is now taken as legalization of pot. Even though it’s still just a plant that anyone could grow.

Washingtonians, Americans, are wholly inept, ignorant & subservient to whatever their governments would like to subject us to.